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NHL, players finally look like they’re trying to make a deal

(L-R) Special counsel to the NHL Players Association Steve Fehr and Bill Daly, Executive Director of the NHL, discuss negotiations with the NHL Players Association at the Westin Times Square on December 5, 2012 in New York City.Photo: Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

NEW YORK — For all the potentially apocalyptic threats that have been floated out into the air — a refusal by NHL players to even negotiate a salary cap, a refusal by owners to give a dollar more, and to a far lesser extent decertification, all various forms of dynamite strapped to the bridge footings of hockey — the latest National Hockey League lockout was always destined for a fairly simple choice.

There was always going to be a point when owners and the players would have to make a choice between playing the season or blowing it up. Simple. At some point you run out of time to cram in a shortened, pressure-packed, how-it-probably-should-be schedule, and delivering gloomy threats doesn’t really get you anything but another wasted day. The NHL lockout, as it lumbers into December, is approaching that point.

And maybe that is why Wednesday night in New York, 81 days into the lockout, the two sides began negotiating. Offers were exchanged and countered. Terms were discussed and hammered at and elasticized. It was reported the NHL wanted to push a new collective bargaining agreement to 10 years, at least partly to mitigate the impact of any make-whole provisions to honour existing contracts; that the league offered US$300-millionon transition payments to honour those contracts, though some of it was reportedly designed for pensions, which means the two sides are between US$93-US$143-million apart, down from US$182-million; the league still wants contract term limits, which the players don’t like, and the 10-year deal is a sticking point. There are issues. Nothing’s done.

All this happened as the the owners went in and out and in and out of the players’ room at the Westin Times Square like it was the world’s dullest Benny Hill sketch. It was the second straight day that the two sides met without NHL commissioner Gary Bettman or NHLPA executive director Don Fehr, after eight hours of what were universally described as positive informal talks on Tuesday.

It was, in short, collective bargaining. The players presented an offer in the early afternoon; the owners countered just after 4 p.m., and left after 15 minutes with a genial air about them to let the players mull it over. The owners’ negotiating committee of the day — Larry Tanenbaum of Toronto, Boston’s Jeremy Jacobs, Tampa’s Jeff Vinik, Winnipeg’s Mark Chipman, Calgary’s Murray Edwards and Pittsburgh’s Ron Burkle, the supposed saviour of Tuesday’s talks — came and went, came and went, as the assembled cameras captured B-roll and stills and reporters tried to decipher body language. In the room, the owners come and go, talking of how much they will owe.

The point, though, is that this how real negotiations are conducted, and that alone was progress. All the posturing and spin and theatre that has taken place during this lockout — the league offering a hammer to begin, the union offering three back-of-a-cocktail-napkin offers, the league storming out after 10 minutes, the duelling leaks and news conferences full of deeply rehearsed regret — was replaced on Tuesday by the relative silence of work.

All the posturing and spin and theatre that has taken place during this lockout was replaced on Tuesday by the relative silence of work.

Tuesday night, deputy commissioner Bill Daly and NHLPA deputy Steve Fehr stood side-by-side and addressed the media. Wednesday night, the media podium was disassembled, and then reassembled, and the back and forth went late into the evening. There were pessimistic rumblings, and tension, and it didn’t break up until 12:50am, and Winnipeg player rep Ron Hainsey said the two sides would continue meeting on Thursday. But that’s what happens when you’re actually exchanging proposals. This is what it looks like when you’re trying to make a deal.

And through all of it, the same undercurrent was present: This was a chance. While everybody cautioned that there was still a lot of work to do, this was an opportunity to actually lash together the component pieces of the deal that’s been lying there in the middle all this time. It’s not the last opportunity they will have; it’s not end times. But the idea of a 60-game season is still in play, however theoretically — and some sponsorship deals are said to be guaranteed if you play three-quarters of a season — and that meant this was a chance to actually compromise and make a deal.

“We had good candid dialogue on a lot of issues,” said Daly who, like Hainsey, did not take questions. “There continue to be some critical open issues between the two parties, and we understand they should be getting back to us tomorrow on some of those issues.”

Really, that chance always been in the cards, barring an act of insanity. On Tuesday, Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby and Burkle, along with the mystical presence of Mario Lemieux, were said to be instrumental in brokering a better, more progress-friendly tone. When Alexander Ovechkin was quoted Wednesday as telling a Russian outlet that there was “no progress,” while essentially admitting that he had no clue what was actually occurring, it was so funny that it felt almost scripted. The Crosby-Ovechkin rivalry lives!

Of course, the whole thing feels scripted, at times. It’s easy to imagine this as just another section of the Proskauer Rose playbook, since the worker-crushing law firm has mounted this production before in last year’s negotiations with the NFL and NBA. This breakthrough in negotiations occurred after Bettman suggested the meeting without himself and Fehr, and wouldn’t Burkle be a fine choice as the good cop to Jacobs’s bad cop? The NBA signed its new deal on Dec. 8 of last year, after some frantic negotiating in late November; you could be forgiven for thinking that actually making a deal was just the pre-planned scenario the league was driven to after 80 days of being frustrated by Fehr’s stubborn refusal to bargain on their terms, or be vilified in the public eye.

But then, these two sides have been steadily creeping closer in terms of actual dollars the whole time. They are closer than ever. All they need is a bridge across the gap and to avoid any explosions.

So this is a chance. If you squint and hope you could imagine a different sort of explosion is coming, a hockey Big Bang, when all of a sudden instead of make-whole provisions and HRR and lawyers, we will be talking about goaltending and line combinations and a season where just about every team will sprint flat-out for 50 or 60 games, and it will be like watching roller derby, even more than usual. (When asked if Vegas should favour the over for groin pulls, one player said, “That’s a safe bet.”)

But what is in play here is the good vibes of Tuesday, the first real good vibes of this entire lockout, where both sides peered over the cliff and decide that hey, maybe it’s best not to fall. There’s a chance here, and what a shame it would if anybody loses their balance, and that chance floats away.

After graduating from the University of British Columbia, Bruce Arthur joined the Post in 2001 as a sports reporter. After covering the Toronto Raptors, he became the paper's basketball columnist in 2005... read more, its Toronto columnist in 2007, and its national columnist in 2008. His work currently appears across the Postmedia chain three times a week. Arthur was born in Vancouver, is married, and lives in Toronto.View author's profile